Mets Add Matsuzaka and Some Intrigue for Final Weeks of the Season

By ANDREW KEH

August 22, 2013

Six years after he arrived in the United States and helped the Boston Red Sox win a World Series, pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka became a member of the Mets.

He will join the team on Friday at Citi Field, and after taking a moment or two to introduce himself to his teammates, he will get right to it, taking the mound for a start against a familiar foe — the American League’s Detroit Tigers.

If all goes reasonably well, Matsuzaka, a right-hander from Japan who turns 33 next month, should continue to start for the Mets in the season’s final leg, adding some intrigue to what is shaping up to be the team’s fifth straight losing campaign.

Troubled by arm injuries in recent seasons, Matsuzaka is not the pitcher he once was. Still, he pitched decently this season for Cleveland’s Class AAA team in Columbus, Ohio: since July 2, he has gone 4-4 in 10 starts with a 3.56 earned run average and 54 strikeouts.

But with no spots open in the Indians’ rotation, Matsuzaka asked for his release Tuesday, and the Indians granted it, allowing the Mets to step in and offer him a major league contract for the remainder of 2013. The deal was officially announced on Thursday afternoon.

For the Mets, the deal seems to make sense on several levels. It creates some buzz for them as they head toward September with a 58-67 record and no real shot at the playoffs, a set of circumstances that usually leads any number of fans to lose interest.

The deal will also help the Mets fill the sudden vacancies in their starting rotation, with Jenrry Mejia and Jeremy Hefner lost to injuries for the rest of the season and the young right-handers Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler facing inning limits that may keep them from pitching at times as the season winds down.

Daisuke Matsuzaka in 2010. He will start for the Mets on Friday and should continue to start in the season’s final leg.

Barton Silverman / The New York Times

If Matsuzaka pitches better than expected, he could conceivably enter into the Mets’ plans for 2014, although starting pitching is probably the team’s strong point. Harvey, Wheeler, Jon Niese and Dillon Gee are all in line to be part of next year’s rotation, and the Mets have several talented minor leaguers in the wings.

Matsuzaka was a star in Japan when his team, the Seibu Lions, granted him permission in late 2006 to pursue a major league career in the United States via the posting system. In the bidding war that followed, the Red Sox won out with a huge bid of $51.1 million, beating out a number of other teams, including the Mets and the Yankees.

The Mets had money to spend at the time. Their general manager, Omar Minaya, was reported to have bid nearly $40 million for Matsuzaka, a figure that would have won out had the Red Sox not come in higher.

The Red Sox then signed Matsuzaka to a six-year, $52 million contract. In his first season, in 2007, he was 15-12 with a 4.40 E.R.A. as Boston won its second World Series in four years. Matsuzaka was 2-1 in that postseason, earning a win against the Colorado Rockies in Game 3 of the Series.

The next season, Matsuzaka was 18-3 with a 2.90 E.R.A., and he nearly helped Boston make it back to the World Series. But he also led the American League in walks that season, with 94, a troubling statistic that pointed to his tendency to nibble around the plate with his pitches.

In 2009, arm issues began to emerge. He made only 12 starts that year for the Red Sox, going 4-6 with a 5.76 E.R.A. After a mediocre 2010 season in which he went 9-6 with a 4.69 E.R.A. in 25 starts, he ended up needing Tommy John surgery in June 2011, and he did not pitch effectively for the Red Sox again.

A footnote to Matsuzaka’s career, and an intriguing one, is that his initial acquisition by the Red Sox put pressure on Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman to answer back. Cashman did, with perhaps the worst decision of his long tenure in New York: he quickly won the bidding for another Japanese pitcher, Kei Igawa, at $26 million and then gave the left-handed Igawa a five-year, $20 million contract.

But Igawa turned out to be a bust, pitching in just 16 games for the Yankees over two seasons and spending almost all of his time in the minor leagues.

Igawa is now back in Japan, and Matsuzaka is a Met, a famous baseball name joining a team that still often dwells in relative obscurity, at least on the days that Harvey is not pitching. Even if it turns out to be just a brief visit by Matsuzaka, it will add some flavor to the Mets’ September.